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Website: http://www.highwaysperformance.org/
<p>In the tradition of John Leguizamo’s Freak and Danny Hoch’s Jails, Hospitals and Hip Hop comes the one-man play “Heavy Like the Weight of a Flame,” by Brooklyn actor R. Ernie Silva. “Heavy” is the serio-comic autobiographical story of a street kid who leaves home in search of liberation from past tragedies, including the deaths of close friends and an older brother he idolized. Fearful of becoming another casualty of the street, he grabs his guitar and a few belongings and hits the road, riding freight trains and encountering the harsh reality that life in the rest of America is not that much different than Brooklyn.
Silva is a recent graduate of the first ever MFA acting program at the USC School of Theatre, one of 10 actors selected for the inaugural class. He has performed off Broadway, on television and as a stand up comic across the country.
In Reina Alejandra Prado’s “Whipped!,” Virginia, a good Mexican girl, is caught in a time warp of 1950s ideals of domesticity and womanhood. What life lessons does she learn from the women in her family, Eartha Kitt, and fetish culture to break free her inner sex goddess and eventually find love?
Since 1994, Prado has performed to audiences throughout California, Arizona, New York City, Washington, DC, and internationally in Scotland, Mexico and Cuba. She is a founding member along with Pat Payne & Dora McQuaid of The NeoSpinsters, a poetry performance collective. She has also collaborated with the L.A. Coyotas, a Chicana artist collective, and has read with a group of California Latino poets known as CALatinidad. In her first poetry collection Santa Perversa and Other Erotic Poems (Calaca Press, 2001), she challenged taboos imposed on Latina women by delving into the realm of the erotic affirming that sexesmiotroerórtico (sex is my other erotic).
Bringing to life an array LGBTQ pan-Latina/o characters, Adelina Anthony’s “Jotalogues” is part of a full-length solo performance that tackles intergenerational conversations among queer Latina/os. “Jotalogues” is being workshopped and developed one character at time, and other characters have been seen in San Francisco, Berkley, and Austin. At Highways, Anthony will bring to life La Josie, an elder in her 70’s who has made her life on the ranch raising chickens and children, all the while courting her neighbor’s wives. Tackling the conversation of “culture vultures,” La Josie defends her land and herself as the original Zen Ranchera.
Anthony is a groundbreaking Xicana-Indígena multi-disciplinary artist whose theater presentations have garnered numerous awards and nominations. She recently came off of her highly successful run of “Bruising for Besos” a world-premiere that garnered rave critical reviews and two extensions by popular demand. She was a nominee for a prestigious 2009 Alpert Award in theater, which rewards experimenters who are challenging and transforming art, their respective disciplines and society.
Yosimar Reyes, a two-spirit poet/activist from the mountains of Guerrero, Mexico, and now based out of San Jose, CA, performs work from his new collection For Colored Boys Who Speak Softly… Reyes holds the title for the 2005 as well as the 2006 South Bay teen Grand SLAM Champion, has been featured in the documentary 2nd Verse: The Rebirth of Poetry, and has been published in Mariposas: A Modern Anthology of Queer Latino Poetry,</p>
Highways Performance Space
Highways Performance Space is Southern California's boldest center for new performance. Founded in 1989, Highways continues to be an important alternative cultural center in Los Angeles that encourages fierce new artists from diverse communities to develop and present innovative works.
Highways promotes the development of contemporary socially involved artists and art forms. Our mission is implemented through four programs (the performance space, workshop/university program and two galleries). Annually, Highways co-presents approximately 250 performances by solo dramatic artists, small theater groups, dance companies and spoken word artists; curates and exhibits approximately 12 contemporary visual art exhibits per year with work that explores the boundaries between performing and visual art forms; commissions and premieres new work by outstanding performing artists; organize special events, curate festival, offer residency and educational programs that engage community members in the arts while providing access to professionally-directed instruction.
